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Chapter Summaries : An Overview

Decent Essays

Chapter: 1- Introduction: An overview. Sovereignty. All of us hear this word so many times in a day, we have read in our text books when we were school going kids. And at this point of time also, we come across with this word in our daily life in newspapers, books, review of some act by a newspaper or by somebody’s mouth who is giving some lecture on government specially. Now the question that arises is that what does one actually mean by sovereignty? Why do they say that sovereignty is an essential element for a state? Why can’t we separate sovereignty from a state? As given by Grotius “Sovereignty is the supreme political power vested in him whose acts are not subject to any other and whose will cannot be over-ridden” . Greeks are considered to be first ones’ who realized that there is something like sovereignty existed, may be not exactly as we see it today, but they were never aware of this term ‘sovereignty’, the father of political science Aristotle used a term ‘supreme power’ but in a different sense. Sovereignty is a concept of modern political theory. Earlier, this term was souverainete, derived from Latin and then French, was given by Bodin in his Six Books on the Republic (1576) and then the word in its English equivalent was came to be known as ‘sovereignty’. In the words of Bodin “sovereignty is the supreme power of the state over citizens and subjects unrestrained by law” . In spite of being the supreme power of the state, sovereignty is

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